...and this time it won't be a wet
one, as the Pride
And Prejudice star's latest movie role calls for a little more starch

Colin Firth is
best known
for roles as dashing aristocrats and well-heeled heroes, but in his
latest
film, What A Girl Wants, he plays a rather starchy father and
politician,
Henry Dashwood. and for once, the female lead is not a thirtysomething
singleton, but an American teenager. Daphne Reynold (17-year-old Amanda
Bynes) is the product of a relationship Dashwood once had with a
bohemian
American (played by Kelly Preston). When the spirited teen hops on a
plane
to London in search of her long-lost father, a fairy-tale-like
adventure
begins.

When Colin did
his research
on his co-star, he discovered her to be a prodigious talent who had her
own TV programme. The Amanda Show, at the age of 13. “She is a
massive
star to a particular demographic,” says Colin, who will be 43 in
September.
“I didn’t know her really, but my kids did.”

The kids are
12-year-old
Will, from his relationship with American actress Meg Tilly, and
two-year-old
Luca, with Italian wife Livia.

And they may even
be able
to see Daddy in What A Girl Wants. As a rule, his sons aren’t
allowed
to watch their father’s work. “We decided not to do that. When he
[Will]
was very young, I didn’t want it to be confusing, to see me in strange
situations, and to have to explain the difference between reality and
fiction.
He has seen things now. He’s been on an aeroplane when they have shown
something. You can’t control that. It is a bit freaky. I wasn’t there
at
the time. He was about three and stood up and shouted, “That’s my
daddy!”

Until now, Colin
has been
known for playing virtually unattached and most assuredly childless
guys
such as Jack in The Importance Of Being Earnest and
football-mad
Paul in Fever Pitch. His Darcy characters, in both Pride
And
Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diary, are bachelors who
appear
tough nuts to crack, and they’re his most celebrated performances. But
being a father, he admits, has softened him up, although he insists
it’s
not just his youngest son’s arrival that has made him appreciate the
bond
of fatherhood.

“I’ve been a
father for some
years and they’ve changed me completely,” reveals Colin. “It [having a
child] surprised me enormously because I associated it with tedium, old
age, comfort and death. and it couldn’t be less like that. It was an
invigorating,
frightening upheaval. It’s the most unpredictably wild thing that ever
happened to me. I didn’t think babies were about that. The whole
business
of becoming a dad put me up against my limitations the way I never
thought
possible [and] gave me a different picture of the person I thought I
was.

“There was much
more in me
that I liked and didn’t like. You can’t just do what you want. You
can’t
call your agent when they make a fuss and make life inconvenient for
you.
It’s all on their terms and their schedule and you can’t sleep when you
want and you can’t be impatient when you want to be.”

Colin says Luca’s
birth also
changed the nature of his relationship with Livia, a production
coordinator-turned-
documentary producer, who he met on the set of TV series Nostromo
in Colombia in 1996. “I don’t want to get too specific with my actual
relationship,
but I think that it deepens things. I almost can’t remember what it was
like before.”

Marrying an
Italian has given
the actor’s life an unexpected bonus. “Italy has become a big part of
my
life now,” he enthusiastically explains. “I love it. It’s a huge
blessing.
I sort of married a whole family and whole country. And learning
Italian
is a huge bonus that came at the time that I didn’t expect. I thought I
was doomed to be unilingual for the rest of my life like most
Englishmen.”

It’s become
expected that
our best actors are eventually enticed over to Hollywood, but Colin is
not easily seduced. “Hollywood hasn’t aggressively pursued me. Neither
have I aggressively pursued Hollywood. So it’s a mixture of both. I
think
England has served me very well. I like living in London. I have
absolutely
no intentions of cutting those ties. There is absolutely no reason to
do
so. Certainly not so that I can have a swimming pool and a palm tree.”

He has, however,
been enticed
into one very Hollywood thing—a sequel—and is in London for the rest of
2003 filming Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason with
Renée
Zellweger. “I think everyone feels exactly the same about the sequel.
It’s
worth doing if it’s brilliant, otherwise you go into sequel purgatory,
really,” says Colin.

“The first film
is still
so fresh in everyone’s minds,” he adds. “That’s what makes it so
difficult
to put together, because you really need the same three people to be
available
at the same time. That’s a challenge.”

For fans who
can’t wait until
2004 to see Colin reprise his Mark Darcy role, he’s co-starring with
Hugh
Grant in Love, Actually, the directorial debut of Richard
Curtis
(who co-wrote the screenplay for Bridget Jones’s Diary),out at
the
end of the year.

Still bemusing to
Colin is
the legacy of his career-breakthrough performance as Mr Darcy in Pride
And Prejudice, and the ongoing fan mail he receives because of the
famous wet shirt scene. “I remember guys writing to me saying, ‘How do
you do it? I dive into an old pond and come out in a wet shirt and my
wife
gives me a rollocking’ and I’d have the same problem. My wife wouldn’t
start melting sexually if I came home in a wet shirt.”

That defining
moment in his
career happened by accident, reveals Colin. “The original script had
Darcy
diving naked into that pond. But the BBC crossed it out. It wasn’t easy
for them either, because then what do we do? What about underpants?
That
would have been a disaster too. and when we filmed it, I didn’t think
anything
about it. All this talk about a transparent shirt, clinging to these
contours
which I really don’t have. It’s not even particularly transparent; it
looks
like an old sack to me. I still don’t understand. I think people’s
imaginations
must be very strong!”